I’m a Brooklyn-born runaway with a backwards trajectory. Art is the most consistent home I’ve ever had. From martial art mats and boxing rings to poetry open mics and black box stages, the work gives me a starting ground for asking the right questions, even if I seldom get answers. I reconcile the ephemerality of time by writing my home and my loves into forever. The adage that “you can never go home again” rings especially true when “home” moves away from you so often you start associating roots with chains and second-guessing everything you know. But no one can tell me the people I grew up around, the music and culture, don’t matter or didn’t happen. My childhood neighborhood and its people are mostly gone but I’ve become a time-traveling documentarian, going back to prove that we were there; that our home existed, even when nobody cared about Los Sures.
I write for nomads like me, the abandoned, the voices silenced in vacuums. My stories lean into their sounds, recognizing the opportunity to represent people from every Latine region and barrio, ensuring distinction in each dialect so that non-Spanish speakers can still hear the difference in our music-laced tongues. We are not a monolith.
I’m obsessed with accessibility knowing that, so often, the most liberating words a people can have are inaccessibly hidden behind elitist jargon. When I finally made it to college, I focused on learning to transcribe those words, knowing that artists often say the same things academics do; they just do it more succinctly. Hip-hop can give a complex socio-cultural dissertation in four minutes; I learned more about pacing as a boxer than I ever did in a classroom, still bringing my jump rope before the house opens on every stage. Through studying stories, I learned that we can’t leave behind who we are in hope of making art more “efficiently,” or “properly. “Art, like energy, can’t be created any more than it can be taught. It exists as in internal truth, ready to be awakened, nurtured, and cultivated in tandem with our human experience.
I want my work to act as a gateway for anyone who, like me, felt they weren’t smart enough, talented enough, “normal” enough; that they had to “catch up” or learn some elusive magic before earning the right to call themselves artists. I think it’s beautiful that humanity’s most honest moments frequently occur when we’re playing pretend. We can build endless doors with pretend. Doors can be ideas, or places. I’m interested in doors as people. What happens when I open one? When they open another, then another? A penny doubled every day for a month yields millions of dollars - I know that investing in people is just as exponential.